It Is Your American Duty to Watch the Last-Ever American Idol Episode Tonight

Tonight it finally ends. After months of campaigning and preliminary voting filled with anguish and excitement, clashing of warring egos and world views, America will finally find out who wins this thing.

Oh! Ha, no, the presidential election isn’t happening until November, so enjoy seven more months of that mess. I’m referring, instead, to the grand finale of American Idol, which airs tonight. It’s not just the end of Season 15, but the end of the entire show as we know it, as this is the final go-around for Ryan Seacrest’s traveling circus of song. All the whirling lights will be packed up and sent over to Paula Abdul’s dance studio. Keith Urban will return to the farm to help Nicole with the chores he’s ignored for so long now. And the American people will have to let their Idol-crowning abilities lapse, no longer responsible for deciding the fate of bright-faced dreamers the nation over. It’s a sad, momentous kind of a day.

But before the sad stuff arrives, there is still the matter of who will win. Last night, the top three were winnowed down to just two. White-haired emo-ish rocker Dalton Rapattoni, a 20-year-old from Sunnyvale, Texas, was eliminated, leaving two Mississippi natives to duke it out for the last glittering Idol prize. Who will win? Let’s look at our candidates.

In one corner we have Trent Harmon, 25 years old from Amory, Mississippi, and full’a screeching soul. He’s a big singer who pulls big faces, last night tearing into a slowed-down version of Sia’s “Chandelier,” which he’d performed on the show before; effectively moaning through “If You Don’t Know Me by Now;” and making a sultry case for “Falling,” the original song that will be his victory tune if he wins. Trent first came to viewers’ notice as a strong singer almost felled by mononucleosis during the show’s early, grueling Hollywood Week rounds, but he and his pained faces struggled through, eventually carrying him all the way here, to this glorious edge of a cliff where, tonight, he could take wing and soar.

On the other side is La’Porsha Renae a 22-year-old who is also from Mississippi (Google tells me that her hometown, McComb, is about a four-hour drive from Trent’s—this country is big, but also small!), and who has had one of the more traditionally uplifting Idol-style narratives this season. A single mother who is fighting to give her daughter the better life of so many American dreams (which the show does not let you forget), La’Porsha sings rousing songs with the rumble of divas of old. Last night she sang her original winner’s ballad, a slightly by-the-numbers tune of triumph about battles and obstacles and the overcoming of things, then did a roof-destroying “A House Is Not a Home,” followed by a good but meandering revisit of her version of Rihanna’s “Diamonds.” (Which was also written by Sia—big night for pop’s most mysterious deity.)

I happened to be in the live audience at the Dolby Theatre last night (if you watch the tape back, I’m the one standing house left, not entirely sure when to clap and both delighted and deafened by the young girls behind me who screamed “We love you J.Lo!” in steady two-minute intervals for the entire hour) and judging from the roars of the crowd there, I’d say La’Porsha won it. She’s got the kind of sweeping grandeur that would be an appropriate note for a show like this to go out on. Support for La’Porsha last night was fittingly loud and proud, and, let’s not forget, she sang the last song of the evening, so is perhaps fresher in voters’ minds.

But, Trent has no shortage of fans, and he occupies a different Idol space than La’Porsha does. He’s the artsier one, the more individualistic one. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn in saying that he’s a bit of a weirdo, a wiggler, and an emoter in the style of Lamberts and Lewises past. Of course, Lambert and Lewis did not win their seasons, but still! Still, there is a chance that Trent’s less middle-of-the-road, less directly uplifting chords will strike a nerve with America and he will be dubbed our croon king. I’m giving the edge to La’Porsha, but only by the thinnest of margins.

Both options are acceptable, at least. There is no glaringly unfit finalist here, as there has been in some seasons past. Speaking of seasons past, Idol has brought back 55 of them to perform during tonight’s Viking funeral, after which they will all be sealed up in Seacrest’s tomb to accompany him on his voyage to the afterlife. Or, rather, on his voyage to one of his 6,000 other jobs. The point is, this finale is going to be a rumbling, roaring trip down memory lane, one that anyone who’s watched American Idol at any point—from the Dunkleman days to the DioGuardi diaspora to J.Lo’s last jam—will be able to watch and find something to point at and say “Oh yeahhh.” This is the end of the long strange trip, and I think we all owe it to each other, as a nation, to watch together and sway wistfully, robotically in the blue light of memory.

If nothing else, I will once again be in the live audience. So you can look for me somewhere in that eager crowd, crying like the Sanjaya girl as American Idol sings itself to sweet, eternal sleep.